Rob Damelian has become the first player to win two trophies at WPT Australia 2026, taking down the AUD 460 Bonzai Bounty at The Star Sydney on Saturday, September 19 — just two days after claiming his first boomerang of the festival in the Outback Survivor Bounty.
Both wins came the same way: from behind, heads-up, against an opponent who had him covered. For a festival that has now run for ten days and crowned more than a dozen champions, Damelian's back-to-back comebacks have become the story of the series.
Two trophies, two comebacks
The Bonzai Bounty drew 117 entries in a one-day format, with 17 players reaching the money. Damelian collected AUD 7,631 for the win, denying David Hirst his own first trophy of the festival. Hirst banked AUD 4,986 in second — a solid follow-up to his third-place finish in the Australian Poker Cup earlier in the series, but not the result he was chasing.
Chang Yoo completed the podium for AUD 3,483, with Kamran Samimi and Gening Dai rounding out the top five.
What makes the double notable is not the prize money. AUD 7,631 is a modest score by the standards of a three-week WPT festival. It is the pattern. In the Outback Survivor Bounty, Damelian had already battled back from a significant chip deficit to close out the title. In the Bonzai Bounty, he faced the identical situation against Hirst and produced the identical result.
Low buy-in bounty events reward exactly this kind of player. The structures are fast, the stacks get short, and heads-up play frequently begins with one player holding a three-to-one or four-to-one lead. Under those conditions, the short stack's equity is far higher than most players intuitively believe — and the leader's edge is far more fragile. A player comfortable playing a 10-big-blind stack aggressively, shoving wide and forcing marginal calls, can flip a match in three hands.
That is a learnable skill, and it is where a lot of recreational players leak value. Our tournaments guide and our primer on ICM both cover why short-stack decisions near the end of a tournament carry disproportionate weight relative to the chips involved.
The Prime Championship keeps growing
Alongside the side events, the AUD 1,500 WPT Prime Australia Championship continued through its opening flights — and the numbers are climbing in the right direction.
Day 1c became the largest flight of the tournament so far, drawing 249 entries and surpassing both Day 1a (235) and Day 1b (223). Just 32 players survived the night.
Sasha Skalrud emerged with a commanding 985,000 chips, topping not only Day 1c but the overall leaderboard heading into the final starting flight. Ehsan Amiri was the nearest challenger from the same flight with 687,000, followed by Ken Demlakian on 667,000. Vincent Green-Gibson (640,000) and Jin Xue (630,000) also finished above the 600,000 mark.
Several players who featured earlier in the festival advanced as well. Filip Radic, fourth in the Australian Poker Cup, bagged 464,000, while Tolly Sakellariou progressed with 455,000.
With three flights complete, the WPT Prime Championship has attracted 707 entries, and 97 players have secured Day 2 seats. One final flight — Day 1d, starting at 12:30 p.m. Sunday — remains.
Why the flight-by-flight growth matters
The ascending pattern across Day 1a, 1b and 1c is a good sign for the festival and a familiar one in multi-flight tournaments. Fields tend to build as the week progresses for three reasons: weekend availability, players busting earlier events and re-entering the flagship, and word of mouth about the structure.
It also creates a practical consideration for anyone planning a schedule around a multi-flight event. Later flights are typically larger, which means a slightly softer average field as recreational players arrive, but also more entries competing for the same number of Day 2 seats. Earlier flights are smaller and tend to be sharper, but a bag from Day 1a carries the same value as a bag from Day 1d.
If you are entering a multi-flight event and can only play once, the conventional advice is to take the latest flight you can, because the field composition is usually more favourable. If you can fire multiple bullets, the reverse logic applies — start early, so a bust still leaves you time to re-enter.
That kind of scheduling decision is a bankroll question as much as a strategy one, and our guide to bankroll management walks through how to budget for re-entry events without overexposing yourself.
Context: WPT Australia's dual-championship format
The 2026 edition of WPT Australia, running September 10 to 30 at The Star Sydney, is the first time the tour has brought a dual-championship format to Australian soil. The AUD 1,500 WPT Prime Australia Championship (September 17–22) is followed by the AUD 5,000 WPT Australia Championship (September 24–30), with final tables for both events livestreamed.
That structure gives the festival two peaks rather than one, and it broadens the price range considerably. An AUD 1,500 buy-in is accessible to a serious recreational player; an AUD 5,000 Championship is squarely in semi-professional territory. Running both in the same festival, three weeks apart, means players can satellite into the smaller event, run deep, and roll the proceeds into the larger one — a progression the tour has clearly designed for.
Earlier festival results have already produced a spread of winners. Ailen Ji took the Australian Poker Cup for AUD 83,740 after a memorable king-high hero call. Deborah An won the Ladies Australian Championship. Christopheros Winters, Thomas Lee, Troy Sweet, Soonhyeong Kwon and Taryn Sabine-Shaw have all claimed boomerangs. Damelian is the only player to claim two.
What this means for players
Three practical takeaways from the week's action:
Short-stack skill is undervalued. Damelian's two titles both came from behind heads-up in fast-structured events. If you play low buy-in bounty or turbo formats, push-fold ranges and heads-up shove charts are the highest-return study you can do. The maths is simple, the ranges are memorisable, and the situations recur constantly.
Multi-flight fields reward planning. Knowing that later flights usually run larger lets you make a deliberate choice about when to enter, rather than defaulting to whichever day is convenient.
Festival schedules are built for progression. WPT Australia's two-championship structure is increasingly the norm at major festivals, and it rewards players who satellite in rather than buying in directly. Online qualifiers into live events remain one of the best value propositions in poker — a point our real money poker guide covers in detail.
Day 1d of the WPT Prime Championship concludes Sunday, with survivors returning Monday to play down alongside the 97 players already through. Two more one-day events — the AUD 460 Bondi Beach Boy and the AUD 580 Single Shot Deep Freeze — run alongside it.
Whether Damelian adds a third boomerang before the festival closes on September 30 is an open question. On current form, nobody at The Star would rule it out.
Sources: Somuchpoker, World Poker Tour